Babel Undone

Richard J. Mouw

A few decades ago I published a short piece in Christianity Today
about something I had observed on a Chicago expressway. I had been
following a car that exhibited a Playboy bunny decal in its rear
window; then as I went to pass the car I also noticed a plastic statue
of Mary on its dashboard. My published reflections were meant to be lighthearted,
although they now strike me as a bit too smart-alecky. Was there some intra-family
compromise at work here, I wondered—between, say, a would-be Hugh Hefner
and his pious wife? No, I opined, this must be an expression of some profound
theological perspective—and I went on to play around with some Tillichian
and Bultmannian possibilities.

Even though I was simply trying to pull off a bit of theological humor,
my attempt to do so was based on an important assumption: that the juxtaposition
of these two seemingly conflicting images required some kind of coherent
explanation. Either the car’s symbol system was a battleground between
different persons with different value systems, or the symbols did in fact
cohere, in a way not immediately apparent, within a single person’s perspective
on reality. What I did not take seriously as an option was that these symbols
were indeed incompatible and yet were held simultaneously and sincerely
by the same person.

This latter option seems much more plausible for me today. The leader
of an evangelical ministry on university campuses told me a while back
that his organization is struggling with difficult questions about how
to present the claims of the Christian faith to present-day students. In
the not so distant past, he observed, evangelicals would employ an apologetic
approach that placed a strong emphasis on the coherence of a Christian
view of reality. The biblical perspective was shown to tie things together,
to answer adequately more questions than other worldviews. Such an approach
challenged students to make a clear choice between Christianity and, say,
a naturalistic or an Eastern religious perspective. But today’s students
don’t seem to put much stock in coherence and consistency. They think nothing
of participating in an evangelical Bible study on Wednesday night and then
engaging in a New Age meditation group on Thursday night, while spending
their daily jogging time listening to a taped reading of The Celestine
Prophecy—without any sense that there is anything inappropriate about
moving in and out of these very different perspectives on reality.

This syndrome was brought home to me in a poignant manner a while back
when I was a guest on a radio talk show. It was during a time when two
major newsmagazines had just run feature articles about "the historical
Jesus," and the host was quite eager to discuss the topic. My fellow
guest was a church leader of liberal bent, and he expressed strong skepticism
about the reliability of the New Testament accounts of the resurrection
of Jesus—an assessment with which I strongly disagreed. When we opened
the discussion to questions from our listening audience, one of our callers
was a young woman who was identified as Heather from Glendale. "I’m
not what you would call, like, a Christian," Heather began. "Actually,
right now I am sort of into—you know, witchcraft and stuff like that? But
I agree with the guy from Fuller Seminary. I’m just shocked that someone
would, like, say that Jesus wasn’t really raised from the dead!"

I was taken aback by Heather’s way of offering support for my position.
Her comment still strikes me as rather bizarre. And the more I have thought
about what Heather said, the more I worry about her and what she represents
in contemporary culture. To be sure, I am not as shocked by this phenomenon
as I would have been in the days when I wondered about the juxtaposition
of Playboy decals and plastic Madonnas. Indeed, I can imagine having
a rather enjoyable conversation with Heather from Glendale. In the account
given in Acts 17, the Apostle Paul was engaged in what looked like a productive
and friendly dialogue with some Athenian philosophers until he told them
about the resurrection of Jesus; then many of them began to ridicule him.
The narrator adds, however, that "others said, ‘We will hear you again
about this’" (Acts 17:32); some of these latter folks, we are told,
eventually became believers. I have often wondered what the conversation
was like when Paul talked further to these pagan inquirers intrigued by
the idea of Jesus’ resurrection. Maybe a conversation with Heather from
Glendale would give me a feel for the tone of that dialogue.

But for all of that I do worry about Heather. I am concerned about the
way she seems to be piecing together a set of convictions to guide her
life. While I did not have the opportunity to quiz her about the way in
which she makes room in her psyche for an endorsement of both witchcraft
and the Gospel’s resurrection narratives, I doubt that Heather subscribes
to both views of reality, Wicca and Christianity, in their robust versions.
She is placing fragments of worldviews side by side without thinking about
their incompatibility. And it is precisely the fact that these disconnected
cognitive bits coexist in her consciousness that causes my concern.

While I worry about Heather’s inner life, I am also concerned about
the larger moral and spiritual context that has contributed to her psychic
confusion. There is a sense in which Heather is a microcosm—or a microchaos—of
the larger culture.

Back in 1990 Harper’s magazineinvited five specialists
on urban life to discuss what is, and what is not, happening in America’s
public spaces today. The editors asked the experts to address in particular
the decline of public life that is resulting in the "debauched public
discourse" of talk radio and Jerry Springer-type TV shows.
The assembled experts included two architects, one urban planner, a sociologist,
and a sculptor, so they naturally paid special attention to the physical
dimensions of urban life. And while the experts did not agree among themselves
about how best to construct a healthy public space, they were unanimous
in thinking that things are not well in our urban communities. Nor were
they confident that our problems will be solved by better urban planning
alone. As one of the architects put it, "What we long for in the design
of our public space and in the character of our public life is not fragmentation
and difference but a sense of what we have in common while knowing our
difference—a sense of wholeness."

This larger picture can be seen writ small in Heather’s inner landscape.
She experiences "fragmentation and difference" within her inner
world. She lacks a sense of commonness, of wholeness, in her psyche. And
her individualized fragmentation mirrors the larger cultural brokenness.

The disturbing thing is that there are intellectual leaders who celebrate
this kind of disconnected selfhood. Take the case of Kenneth Gergen, a
psychologist who has written a much-discussed study of contemporary selfhood,
The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (1991).
Gergen argues that traditional conceptions of how to understand personhood—namely,
that we do or do not have souls or unconscious minds, that people have
"intrinsic worth" or "inherent rationality"—have been
exposed by "the postmodern turn" as inappropriate. These are,
after all, ways of talking, not reflections of the actual nature of persons.
In contrast to the narrow range of options and the oppressive restraints
favored by "totalizing" systems of understanding, postmodernism
opens the way to the full expression of all discourses, to a free play
of discourses. From this way of viewing things, we help people best, says
Gergen, by inviting them into an "endless wandering in the maze of
meaning," in which they regularly experience "the breaking down
of oppositions."

To be sure, Gergen wants individuals to find some way of blending, through
both internal and external dialogues, various "richly elaborated discourses
into new forms of serious games that can take us beyond text and into life."
But it is not clear exactly what standards are to guide this process in
a world in which all comparative judgments are arbitrary, indeed "imperialistic."
Why should my Dodger-fan self have any less status in my life than the
self that senses a need to serve the poor? Why should I prefer any instinct
or preference over any other one? In such a world, what is the difference
between a healthy and an unhealthy self?

Similar problems face us on the collective level. When Phyllis Trible,
a well-known Old Testament scholar, completed her term as president of
the Society of Biblical Literature a few years ago, she observed that the
field of biblical studies is presently in a chaotic state. "Gone are
the days," she said, "when the Society could define itself in
rather precise and limited ways. Competing voices, tongues, and the confusion
of tongues have extended research almost without limits." And while
some scholars lament this situation, there are many others "who rejoice
in the loss of a center, seeing it as the demise of a privileged point
of view. Far from despairing, they encourage the celebration of chaos."

Trible’s comments are directed to a specific field of academic studies,
but her description can be taken as a fairly accurate portrayal of the
larger cultural scene in North America. While many people complain about
a widespread loss of a sense of centeredness, others rejoice in this loss,
celebrating the chaos. For these celebrants it is good to be rid of the
conviction that the array of conflicting perspectives and convictions can
be confidently assessed from a standpoint of epistemic privilege.

Trible alludes in passing to the image of Babel in her comments about
the "confusion of tongues" in contemporary biblical studies.
In his book Ethics after Babel, Jeffrey Stout uses that image more
extensively, arguing that our contemporary cultural situation is one for
which the biblical image of the Tower of Babel can serve as a "trope."
In Stout’s account of our moral situation, the Babel of our moral diversity
is haunted by three "specters"—"skepticism, nihilism, and
relativism"—that are causing what he sees as "worrisome effects
on how we live our lives." While Stout refuses to give in to the threat
of these three specters, he still assumes the backdrop of Babel, arguing
that we can develop a workable moral discourse by a pragmatic process that
he describes as "moral bricolage": a kind of moral puttering,
a piecing things together by drawing on whatever odds and ends that are
available.

Stout is quite right when he says that "we are all bricoleurs,
insofar as we are capable of of creative thought at all." I certainly
am, and I am very aware of the fact that my habits of bricolage are shaped
by many of the cultural factors that are celebrated by the postmodern anti-"imperialists."
There are significant ways in which I am very pleased to be engaged in
bricolage. I am a traditional Calvinist in my theology, but my Calvinism
is not, nor should it be, of the exact vintage of my forebears. I have
had many more opportunities than they could have imagined to enter into
serious dialogue with other kinds of Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern
Orthodox, and Jews; and I have come away from those encounters with new
theological odds and ends to incorporate into my understanding of reality.

My own experience, then, can be seen as confirming Stout’s hypothesis,
that it is possible to piece together a workable moral perspective in the
midst of Babel. But I am not content to leave it there. In the Christian
scriptures, there is a more profound corrective to Babel’s chaos: Pentecost
was God’s reversal of Babel. There the confusion of tongues was replaced
by effective communication. On that founding event of the Christian church,
multiculturalism was not eradicated, but people were nonetheless capable
of understanding each other: "Are not all these who are speaking Galilieans?
And how is it that we hear, each of us in our own native language? . .
. [I]n our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power"
(Acts 2:7-11).

I take the Pentecostal alternative to Babel seriously, because I believe
the miracle of Pentecost really did happen. But I also believe that it
can serve as an alternative trope for anyone who refuses to allow Babel
to function as the normative image for the human condition. Babel represents
one kind of multi-culturalism. It posits an irreducible diversity, a loss
of common patterns of understanding; Babel confuses, divides, and erects
barriers. Pentecost, on the other hand, represents a very different kind
of multiculturalism. The Pentecostal experience does not eliminate the
diversity of tongues, but it provides us with the ability to communicate
across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Pentecost heals, unites, and
promotes understanding.

It is these Pentecostal convictions that I would bring to my dialogue
with Heather from Glendale. I would probe for what she might see as the
deeper connections—however confused she might be in describing them—between
her apparently disconnected odds and ends. I would offer her the promise,
not of a mere mingling of disparate cognitive claims as she walks through
the maze, but of an integrated selfhood.

Albert Borgmann, who teaches philosophy at the University of Montana,
wrote an excellent book, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, a few years
ago in which he discusses the ways in which the postmodern consciousness
often limits its attention to the surfaces of reality. He addresses this
malady with a call to rediscover "the eloquence of things" in
their particularity, to recognize "the things that command our respect
and grace our life," and help us to find "the depth of the world."
This is what I hope for in Heather from Glendale’s psyche. And it is also
what I hope for in our larger culture.